If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.
—
Henry Ford (via this excerpt on the trap of comparing marginal costs vs. full costs from Clayton Christensen’s “How Will You Measure Your Life?”)
Henry Ford (via this excerpt on the trap of comparing marginal costs vs. full costs from Clayton Christensen’s “How Will You Measure Your Life?”)
Jay Prakash Pandey
on 07 Aug 12Absolute true words.
Andruby
on 07 Aug 12Are you justifying your MBP Retina purchase? :)
Peter Urban
on 07 Aug 12Ok, you made me curious enough to get and read it now.
Sharky
on 07 Aug 12I just read the excerpt from Clayton Christensen’s “How Will You Measure Your Life?” (link above).
It is a powerful message for business, life and relationships.
As usual the Henry Ford quote is as true today as when it was stated. Thanks
Pat
on 07 Aug 12Henry Ford was a jerk.
Chris
on 08 Aug 12Had this quote sink in for a few days now.
Sancho Urizo
on 08 Aug 12and if you need a machine and you can borrow it from someone you will be saving money and avoiding consumerism.
Andy
on 08 Aug 12There’s a cost to disposing of machines you own as well. This guy was from another age.
Junjay
on 09 Aug 12The comments about machine disposal and environmentalism are taking this quote too literally-I interpret “machine” to mean any tool. It took a few days for this quote to sink in, but it’s very true-if you need a certain tool and decide to take the cheap route by hacking something together, there’s a good chance you’ll have spent enough time/money to have paid for the tool you needed and yet you still don’t have a reliable tool for the job. I see this all the time at my work, where people are so obsessed with “machine” costs that they neglect the effort costs because they view people as being on salary…
Rob Horton
on 10 Aug 12The important thing we sometimes forget today, that I’m sure was more common-thinking in Henry Ford’s time, is the concept of “need” vs “want”.
Don Schenck
on 13 Aug 12@Pat, thank you for your wonderful contribution to this discussion.
The point is, don’t fall for a False Economy. My current challenge is to overcome this thinking at my employer. I’ll either succeed or “switch”.
Randall
on 13 Aug 12This doesn’t magically justify any machine purchase you can come up with, but maybe it clarifies how you decide if a purchase is worth it: if you don’t get X, are you going to pay for it some other way?
In particular, a stable, mid-sized Web services company is probably wise to invest in a little more hardware than just the bare minimum that will handle current load: you’ll avoid getting overloaded in traffic spikes, help both users and developers out with a little performance boost, and maybe save developers some optimization effort (for example, put off sharding the database by getting a better DB server).
At different times in the same company, both too little and ‘too much’ hardware was used in our server deployments, and I don’t doubt that the extra kit pays for itself for the boss(/sole investor).
Again, this doesn’t magically make any purchase you can name rational; there are limits. If you’re a garage startup, maybe don’t splurge on the best hardware up front to minimize the risk/initial investment in case it doesn’t work out. If you’re Google, the hardware costs are great enough that it makes sense to spend a lot of effort fine-tuning your most-used applications. But in between, where developers are most of your cost and it’s possible to comfortably afford more-than-just-enough hardware, it’s often a win.
This discussion is closed.